Background In the conditions of huge territories and a variety of landscapes of the European Russia, at the restricted amount of professional ornithologists and very insufficient modern financing of ornithological…

The report brings the information about developments in the PECBM scheme in a period from July 2005 to April 2006.The updated indicators were provided to Eurostat for EU Structural and Sustainable Development indicators, European indices of 77 species were published, project outputs were presented at several other events and used for advocacy at national and international level. The workshop was organised in September 2005 in Prague with some 70 participants. The workshop helped to consolidate the network of cooperating individuals and institutions and to set-up plans for near future. Data collation procedure started in March 2006 and it is expected that updated European indices and indicators will be produced by the end of this year. Funding from the European Commission will help to increase capacity, improve data quality and speed and effectiveness of data flow and analysis.

This report presents an enlarged set of population trends and indices of 77 common bird species in Europe, which have been produced by Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme in 2005. The trends and indices presented in this report cover time period 1980 – 2003, although data back to 60s are available from some European countries.

The Common Bird Monitoring scheme has commenced in 2004 in Bulgaria. The project aims at establishing a national widespread breeding bird monitoring scheme based on the UK Breeding Bird Survey model and incorporating the experience from other European countries.In the pilot year (2004) 74 observers took part in the scheme and Over 130 observers in 2005. First two years of the scheme bring promising results and hope to fill in a gap in common bird monitoring geographical coverage in Europe.

The review has shown that substantial progress has been made in development of common bird monitoring schemes in Europe. There are 20 countries with data potentially suitable for generating Pan-European indices for common birds. Much effort should be, however, devoted to improvement of existing national schemes and development new schemes. Full text of the review is available in PDF format.